Leading players in Indian independence

Patrick French reviews Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann

With the 60th anniversary of India's Independence and Partition approaching, a slew of books and television programmes are attempting once again to assess the momentous end of the British Raj. Indian Summer is one of the more lively offerings .

There are so many ways to look at the controversial events of 1947 - as imperial collapse, nationalist vision, Muslim separation, Asian realignment - that they cannot all be accommodated in a single book. Alex von Tunzelmann's solution is to concentrate on the grand personalities, and track their interaction before and after Partition. The result is a fresh account, rich in extraneous but entertaining personal detail.

Her focus is mainly on Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Nehru, Gandhi and Churchill, and it is by looking at their quirks and attitudes that the book comes alive. The 'secret' history of the subtitle might have been dreamed up by the publisher, for the author makes no claim that anything here is secret, except for a tentative and swiftly sidestepped suggestion that Churchill and Jinnah were in furtive communication over the creation of Pakistan.

Given that Churchill was out of power by this time, and there is no documentation to support the claim, it is hard to see how it is relevant. Her research draws on both archives and published work, and I found it hard not to feel affection for a book that leans so heavily on my own Liberty or Death of a decade ago, each reference scrupulously footnoted.

Von Tunzelmann has I think no great interest in the machinations of the Indian nationalist movement, or in the protracted negotiations that led to the final resolution, though she deals with these matters proficiently. She has an uncanny eye for the telling anecdote, garnered from a diary, biography or newspaper cutting.

So we have Winston Churchill shocking the guests at a dinner party 'by suggesting that he have Gandhi bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the Viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample the Mahatma into the dirt.' Or the detail that on the morning of Independence, 'a Ministry of Works carpenter in a white apron and a Homburg hat briskly unscrewed the plaque to the left of the door on King Charles Street that read "India Office", and replaced it with a new one: "Commonwealth Relations Office".'

She does a good line in understatement: when the florid prime minister suggests in 1943 that the fasting Gandhi may have been eating better meals than he has for the past week, von Tunzelmann simply observes that, 'Even outside his fasts, Gandhi was not known to open a bottle of hock at breakfast.'

Where the author breaks ground is by linking disparate facts in a new and revealing way, particularly over Edwina Mountbatten's significance in swaying both her husband and Jawaharlal Nehru. She makes a persuasive case for seeing the Mountbattens' devoted but uneasy marriage as integral to the way in which political events unfolded.

The peculiar three-way relationship between them and Nehru meant that after Independence, when Mountbatten stayed on as governor-general, India's first prime minister influenced Edwina, who in turn would put pressure on her husband. Her previous political radicalism - she was 'in despair' at being made a countess, Mountbatten reported to their daughter, 'for she disapproves so much of all these nonsensical titles' - became deeper and more important.

Like Nehru, Edwina put herself at great personal risk while trying to stop the looting and mob violence in the months after Partition. At a Muslim refugee camp she found a gang of Hindus and Sikhs trying to set it on fire and kill the inmates. Standing in front of the crowd 'as calmly as though she were at a garden party', she threatened to have her guards shoot the agitators. It was a bluff, but it worked.

After Mahatma Gandhi's murder, the Mountbattens sat on the ground during his cremation, much to Churchill's disapproval. A quote from Noël Coward's diary shows just how far Dickie and Edwina had shifted from the sybaritic world of their old London friends: 'Gandhi has been assassinated. In my humble opinion, a bloody good thing but far too late.' When Edwina was photographed embracing her husband's successor, C. Rajagopalachari, before their departure from India, a British newspaper deduced that this showed 'a lack of respect towards European women'.

Von Tunzelmann seems a little uncertain what to make of Mountbatten's viceroyalty. She teases him mercilessly and with reason for his vanity and obsession with pomp, and introduces him as the 'master of disaster' he was nicknamed by his naval colleagues during the Second World War. But when it comes to the withdrawal and the mass migration and massacres that followed, she exonerates him on account of his lack of room for manoeuvre.

She is right about this: there was little he could have done, in practice. The logical conclusion, then, is to ask who created the situation whereby Mountbatten was sent into the middle of a civil war and given a few months in which to engineer a settlement - all without military backup.

Some blame lies with the Indian leaders who exacerbated unrest, but the real responsibility rests with Churchill and Clement Attlee, both of whom as prime minister treated India with a contempt they would not have shown to Europeans - women or men.